It's not so bad if you're doing it professionally because you pretty much set it up once and you're done. But yeah it's annoying for one-off projects or if web dev isn't your main job.

That said you can avoid it. I wrote a website using Fresh (https://fresh.deno.dev/) and that was the only thing I needed. Incredibly simple compared to the usual Node/Webpack mess. Plus you're writing in Typescript, and can use TSX.

I probably would set up ESLint if multiple people were working on the project. But you can definitely start without anything else.